


First Fantasy NaNoWriMo: 10: A Song for a Son, A Tale of a Daughter.

by SkiesOverTokyo



Series: FirstFan NaNoWriMo Drabbles [10]
Category: First Fantasy (Webcomic)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Children's Stories, Fables - Freeform, Other, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 18:16:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16581590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkiesOverTokyo/pseuds/SkiesOverTokyo
Summary: The tale of how La Defilé Noir came to be, in the style of children's books.





	First Fantasy NaNoWriMo: 10: A Song for a Son, A Tale of a Daughter.

Once upon a time there was a girl.   
Now, the girl, being of that age where boys go off into the world to seek their fortunes, fight dragons, and find beautiful princesses, even when fortune, danger and love is readily available at home, grew restless. She wanted to go on adventures of her own, swing swords, see far off sights, and rescue those in danger.  
So she went to her father, a man with experience in adventure, danger and romance of his own. For a while, he had trained her in the sword, and how to read maps, and how to make a fire in driving rain, and a hundred other things, and, even as a young woman, she had begun to realise this was training, of a sort.  
“Father, I want to go on an adventure”, she eventually said, one cold morning, as they were busy learning the history of the Empire, as complex a thing as the multitude of cultures, power-balances and interests that made it up, like a patchwork quilt of a world.   
He closed the book in front of them, rubbed his temples.  
“I knew this day would come”, he eventually said.

She would need to travel light, a sword, a pack, and she could not travel as a girl.  
She cut her hair, wore loose clothing, tied a bandana around her head, so that her hair rose in a messy crown above her head. To all that looked upon her, they saw only a scruffy boy with a sword, and a world to explore.  
Shouldered her pack, sheathed her sword, hugged her father goodbye, and set out to find adventure.  
  
For several moons, the boy made his way to the most famous places of the world, looked upon the castle of the Dragon Emperor from afar, walked the streets of the capital, ate spices that made his mouth burn from furthest Lyriat, drank beer that made his heart warm with love for his fellow man, his tongue loose, and his stomach empty after too many tankards. On the Dragon Coast, he watched drakeboats skid across the sea, saw the carcass of a kraken washed up on Burton Bay, splayed out and drying, like a child’s toy. Travelled to Fayreport, Blakesbarg, even travelled up past Mooresberg to the wall that marked the Edge, and looked out across the tundra, spying, he thought, the glint of a Rüstungnomadenstadt, moving off at the bottom of a set of moutains, in the setting sun.   
  
Soon the boy turned south again, and, putting the leather bound book from his father’s library of the famous places of the Empire at the bottom of his pack, began to feel his way across the country, the old lessons on how to use a compass, and how to read the land bobbing to the surface as though they’d never been away. He began to build his own knowledge, his own rudimentary map, filling in the gaps away from the major cities, as he hiked across foothills and through forests that blotted out the sun except at dawn and dusk.   
  
Along the road one day, the boy, now a young man, met a knight, a woman, in battered, rusty armour. She guarded a bridge, ordered those who wished to cross to duel first. He reluctantly agreed, and in three blows, the woman was on her knees, winded, and beaten, armour cracked, flaking like autumn leaf. He made to cross but something held her back. A pity.  
Over a pint and a thick crust and cheese, the woman poured out her woes-forbidden love, stripped knighthood, left, without purpose, coin, or power in a cruel world, as a sellsword.   
An idea came to the boy then.  
“Take your sword and come with me. I’m going on an adventure.”  
The woman shrugged. She had nothing to lose. The boy was interesting.  
And so the boy and the woman began to travel together. A few easy errands, across the terrain he began to know well, and he bought her a breastplate and a simple helm, ignoring her protests that she couldn’t accept such things.  
  
They came to a village plagued with a drunkard ronin, a man who had lost everything but himself, and now regularly lost that to the bottles of rice wine that littered wherever he went. The knight fought him in the street, and, standing over him in the mud, held out a hand in welcome, not a sword in threat. He found a new master, lost the bottle, and joined the strange duo on their adventure, language barrier aside.  
  
And for a while, the three of them did a reasonably brisk trade in simple jobs-monster hunting, deliveries of items from village to village, and a dozen other errands. But, eventually, they began to realise their little group needed to be larger for truly big adventures-the stories, they agreed, lied about the amount of baggage handlers, trackers, and squires that a single hero would require.   
They found a smith, apothecary and white mage, all in one person in an inn, and he joined them with neither fight nor fuss, but a simply written, and quickly signed contract.  
  
The four of them began to find real work, not just that of budding adventurers, trying to raise enough coin to buy better equipment, but a steady stream of income, coin enough to arm and equip and supply them for longer, and darker and more difficult roads.  
On one of these roads they found themselves followed, and, under cover of darkness, a woman with a gun, a hat, a poncho, and an empty stomach, finally made her appearance, her left foot making a strange noise on every step.  
The war-she was too young to remember which, other than she was originally from beyond the Edge, had taken her leg, her family, and left her with only a gun, and a hatred for the Empire that burned like gunpowder. She’d been tracking them for a man they vaguely remembered working for months before, a guildmaester, tasked with bringing them in to join the guild.   
  
And in the boy’s mind, as a party of four became five, an idea began to grow, and grew greater still on the roads, hills, dales, coasts, through forests and across rivers and seas. _I could have my own guild_.  
  
They found a boy in a cage, horned, and older than the years of five combined, who people marvelled at and feared in equal measure. The show left town. He wasn’t part of it anymore, a pocketful of coin buying his freedom, and, as the horned boy marvelled at the world, as he followed the other five from place to place, as their mage, so the idea gathered pace in the young man’s head  
_I will have a guild._  
  
The final member of the group came across them in an inn. A bad musician, but his hands, in certain other work, had few equals, spiriting a good number of items from the young man’s pockets, before his trickery was spotted. He expected pain, or to be thrown out of the inn into the dark by the six of them. What he got was a job, instantly being put to work on the spoils of a mission.  
  
The guild was formed, and in high spirits, he let loose who she was. In the morning, waking sober and sore on the floor of her room, she expected her hard work to fall apart.   
What she found, packed and ready, was the other six waiting for her.  
“What matters” they said  
“Is that you gave me purpose when I had none”   
“You gave me something to fight for”   
“You gave me a job and an adventure” the smith said  
“You gave me a home, and made me feel wanted”   
“You gave me freedom after so long”  
“You gave me a challenge for my skills”  
“We wouldn’t leave your side for anything” they said.  
  
But it remained their little secret, on the road and beyond, for the world was not so kind in those days, and for another reason, though that is another tale. And so, they set out in search of adventure, little knowing that, before long, adventure would come looking for them.  


 

 


End file.
